Have a wonderful Holiday week

I have been beyond busy, which is fine. I remembered another story about my mom. I had forgotten this for many, many years.

My childhood home had a backyard which ended at "the woods," a narrow strip of woods with a brook running through it. When I scampered up the small bank at the back end of the yard, it was perhaps fifty yards to the brook, which, very conveniently had a fallen tree across it. I could scamper across, then climb up a steep bank for another fifty feet or so, to the corner of two streets. In the winter you could see that corner from my bedroom window. I ran up there year round, and was three houses from my best friend's house.

It was also the convenient path across town for what we then called "hobos." Mom would not call them bums, and we did not talk about "the homeless" back then. A few times in my early-ish childhood, I came out from under the willow tree canopy when I heard my mother loudly yelling at some man at the edge of the woods who seemed to be approaching Nancy and me, playing in our ground-tree house. I do not remember being afraid, however.

Mom had a social conscience. I was with her on the steps of the library for the town's "sympathy march" for the big Washington Civil Rights march.  We all sort of had a to-do there, with speeches and food. But we all listened together to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. because about five people had radios tuned in to the same stations. I don't know whether there were transistors or what. I was too busy looking at the people's faces. Mom made us look at the hosings by the police, and the attack dogs. She felt we should know what other children had to endure. I remember crying and she said, "Honey, you SHOULD cry for them. It is a terrible thing." I was crying because they seemed to MAKE the dogs bite people, but I felt it wise not to say anything. Besides, I DID know she was right.

Which leads me to Christmas. There were three of them--three men with slick-combed hair and chinos and shiny belt buckles. Men who looked, as some Beatrix Potter book said, I think, as if they had dusty corners. I remember one dark green shirt with frayed edges, but it was very smooth. The other men were generally wrinkled. That's what I remember--wrinkled faces, wrinkled shirts, wrinkled trousers. But shiny buckles. Smooth, shiny hair. And clean.

They came together to the back kitchen door from the first Christmas when I was five, and two more after that. My mother handed out  cookies and a $5 bill to these "hobos."  I remember it vividly because my parents felt we should see people who were not doing well. We should know about it and understand. We ourselves were one minor catastrophe from poverty, but my mother would point out "That catastrophe hasn't happened for us. And we're having a wonderful Christmas. And we have a home with a bath and a half, and they have none."

That was a lot of money to my parents, and the men knew it. They were respectful to her and they did not come around at other times--at least not when I saw.  They stopped coming, though, by the time I was nine--the town had done a "sweep" in the fall, and did another one in November so they would not bother people any more. My parents talked about that one morning when they didn't know I had been up before they sat down to breakfast before Daddy went to work. Sometimes I didn't go in and bother them; I sat on the couch, still half asleep, listening to their voices, catching bits and pieces of conversations that swirled far above the head of a child.

"They don't hurt anyone. I don't CARE what they say. Those men were never anything but kind. I ASKED them to come up so I could help, Jim."

"I know, dear. But times are changing. It isn't like when we were kids. Some of these men are dangerous."

"I know, I know. But not our hobos. They were just down on their luck." And that's all I remember.

A year later my mother got a letter from one "to the Lady at 274 Parker Street" and she cried. He had a job and lived in an apartment, but he'd wanted to thank her. All she said was, "See? I was right. He was a perfectly find man."

My parents invited strangers to our home on Christmas Day sometimes. There was a single mom who was a waitress at their favorite restaurant. She brought her little girl one time when I was about eleven, and we gave her a doll. And my dad sat down with some young man from the shoe store, and they worked on something one Christmas afternoon in his den.

My parents wanted us to celebrate, to party, to revel on Christmas. We all did, but it was not out of greed. I think for them it was out of some enormous sense of gratitude and a recognition that so far we had been lucky. Mom hated the word "blessed" because she felt it sounded as if we might think we were specially chosen or something. No, she and dad felt we were simply lucky. And our Christmas was the family's Thanksgiving.

To tell the truth, she was never quite sure about where Jesus the Christ fell into things. She was candid about that, but on Christmas Eve, she would read the story, and we would put the "star in the east that led us" in the scene last thing. Her set had the baby in the manger already, so we decided to put the star up last

When I was a teenager, she would stand there looking at the Créche and say, "Well. I just don't know about God's only begotten son. You may be right, Jetty, that he tried some begotten daughters but they were killed at birth. You are right, honey. People didn't care much about daughters. They didn't when I was a girl, either. But I don't know. There is something about this magical time. I think I would rather believe the story than not. Doesn't it seem wonderful to think that God sent us a BABY to straighten us out? Maybe we can try believing anyway, just the way we believe in other things." And she would sing "God so loved the world..."


She would ask if I believed in Santa and I would smile and say yes. I LIKED believing in elves and fairies and Santa.

"Well, then," she'd say. "Jesus the Christ it is. Where the HELL did I put that North Star?"

***
My friend and I were talking about how to celebrate when we see so many people in need around. She can't and I understand that completely.  For me, though, I am celebrating how lucky I have been in the past three years to have people who reached out to me to help me feel grounded, who actually supported me while I waited eighteen months for Social Security Disability, who linked hands beneath me, a living net of love to keep me from falling.  I honor the beauty that was in both my parents. I honor the gift of love, I guess, hokey as that may sound. Our minister mentioned that revelry is part of our heritage as a species, and perhaps setting aside what amounts to survivors' guilt is okay. That doesn't make us greedy or insensitive.

I have much to think about; much to be grateful for. Without these people who will be here Saturday night, I could very easily have been one of those "hobos" by now. Literally. And without some of you, as well, who sent messages, sometimes gifts, who read what I wrote and made me feel that it was worth going on.

(And, well, besides ... there are cookies. And best of all? there are wind up toys. How can I NOT revel?)


I hope you ALL have a healthy and wonderful holiday season. I will be back in the New Year.